﻿You might think you’re all muscle but about two-thirds of your body is made up of water. Water helps keep your body’s temperature stable, it carries nutrients and oxygen to cells, cushions joints, protects organs and tissues and removes wastes.

You lose water from your body through sweating, breathing, urine and faeces. Being properly hydrated helps your body function at its best. Dehydration – not having enough fluid in your body – can cause headaches, fatigue, crankiness and poor concentration. It also affects your sports performance.

To stay properly hydrated, you need to give your body a certain amount of fluids every day. This includes water, milk and other drinks.

You need to drink more on hot days or if you’re exercising. Make sure you drink plenty of water before, during and after physical activity to put back what you lose through sweat. We often don’t feel thirsty even when we’re dehydrated, so it’s a good idea to drink water regularly even if you aren’t thirsty.

Water and low fat milk are the best drinks for you. They quench your thirst without giving you all the sugar and additives found in fruit drinks and juices, soft drinks, sports drinks and flavoured mineral waters.

Here’s a fact: a 250ml glass of apple juice or cola contains the equivalent of six teaspoons of sugar. Drinking just one can of soft drink every day adds up to 18 kilograms of sugar in a year!​Drinking water also helps rinse your mouth and prevent tooth decay. Most tap water contains fluoride which helps develop strong teeth. On top of that, tap water is inexpensive compared to all other drinks.

Mastery of the body is where true strength and control lye. Not lifting a heavy weight in a once off effort. Focus on movement patterns rather than muscle groups. If you go wild for a few hours a week crawling, climbing, jumping and fighting you'll burn more calories and injury-proof your body. You’ll get the results you’re after and it is so much fun. Training doesn’t have to be an endless grind! Learn to experiment with different moves, to play with a variety of exercise toys and to move in new and exciting ways every day.

If you train at a gym, avoid machines. Your body is a machine, so push it, challenge it! As an alternative, jog to a local park, enjoy the sunshine and fresh air, spend an hour on your feet, never sitting down but instead doing advanced movement patterns like one-legged pistol squats and kettlebell swings (which together constitute perfect posture-correction exercises for lordosis) and by the end of it you’ve trained your whole body naturally and you’ve improved your quality of movement. Now that is a functional workout.

Of course, if you’re in the gym you can still train like an animal, simply avoid machines, learn to use functional tools like kettlebells and Roman Rings and master your own body weight. Long before you go playing with t dumbbells you should really be practicing your own total body integration moves. Want biceps? Think pull-ups not curls. Training the lower body? The leg extension isn't your best friend here, it’s jump squats and kettlebell swings and lunge variations.Source: http://www.theurbanjunglegym.com/#!Isolation-exercises-are-for-robots-youre-an-animal-so-you-should-train-like-one/clfr/55839e620cf2a5839d8f6f31

​﻿Mental toughness is a collection of attributes that allow a person to persevere through difficult circumstances (such as difficult training or difficult competitive situations in games) and emerge without losing confidence.

﻿﻿To instill grit, determination and self control in yourself there are 3 simple steps you can take:

1. It's O.K to FAIL(Once you have tried your best): If you are always making excuses for failure, blaming other coaches, referees, players, etc., you have lost sight of the fact that failure is a MANDATORY component of both learning and becoming mentally tough. Children who are not allowed to fail never have any obstacles to overcome, and blame things outside of themselves for their failure. Every time they encounter an obstacle, they wait to be carried over it, they wait for the problem to be solved for them. They do not persevere, they do not persist; they only learn to give up. If you fail, be observant and ask yourself what can i change to have a better outcome?

2. Praise yourself and others for your Effort and Drive: to be a determined, gritty athlete, you need to have Drive! take note of how you are becoming dominant or struggling through hardship and highlight your achievements which has come through sustained effort over the long haul. praise yourself for being driven and you will come to value, and even embrace the persistent pursuit of long term goals.

3. Be a Model Grit to Yourself and Other Athletes: This is a tough one, but remember that You are what you believe, and what you believe is powerful. Others will see that power and desire it for themselves. Now you are a leader. To be that leader, don’t complain about things out of your control or tough, instead demonstrate and show that what you are doing is not easy, but is worth the struggle, and perseverance required of achieving it.

When it comes to lifting technique is everything. Moving well and being mobile will save you from over use injuries, or those caused by bad movement and posture.

Do you:

Set up well before you touch a weight. Get your back organized before you even look at the barbell?

Squeeze your butt to eliminate an arched back. Squeeze your butt before you do anything in life. Ever. Or KStarr will make you do burpess?

Before you lift, screw your feet into the ground externally without splaying them out like a duck?

Push your knees out whenever you bend your legs? “Knees out” is forever embedded in my brain almost as maniacally as Ace Ventura’s “laces out” bit. I have an image of a room spray painted with the words KNEES OUT repeatedly. But seriously, save your knees on your squats and push them out. Squeeze your butt first.

﻿The Overload Principle is a basic sports fitness training concept. It means that in order to improve, athletes must continually work harder as they their bodies adjust to existing workouts. Overloading also plays a role in skill learning.

For example, if a football player's goal is to improve upper body strength, he would continue to increase training weight loads in upper body exercises until his goal was achieved.

Applying The Overload Principle.The following advice is commonly accepted and practiced:

1. Increase loads gradually and progressively. Training loads should become more intense over a period of time, not increased too abruptly or with too much intensity.2. Test maximums. Through testing, the intensity of training loads can be controlled and monitored.3. Avoid muscular failure.Burnout sets are not advised for most sports training. It is not necessary to train until muscles fail or the athlete collapses.4. Allow ample recovery time. Too little recovery over time can cause an overtraining effect. Too much recovery time can cause a detraining effect.5. Plan and monitor training loads. Design long-range, periodized training programs, test athletes, and evaluate their progress to guide training decisions about overload.6. Track team and individual progress. Identify general areas where there are common deficits compared to other fitness components and skill qualities. If athletes "run out of gas", for example, training can be overloaded to improve skilled performances when fatigued.7. Alternate activities. Organize workouts to allow recovery on some aspects of training while increasing intensity on others. Use periodized planning to link into weekly and daily activities.8. Coordinate all training activities and schedules. Fitness training loads should be adjusted for technical and tactical activities, travel, competitions, and other factors that could influence how overloading should occur.Sourced: http://www.sports-training-adviser.com/overloadprinciple.html

The History of TabataTabata training was discovered by Japanese scientist Dr. Izumi Tabata and a team of researchers from the National Institute of Fitness and Sports in Tokyo.

Tabata and his team conducted research on two groups of athletes. The first group trained at a moderate intensity level while the second group trained at a high-intensity level. The moderate intensity group worked out five days a week for a total of six weeks; each workout lasted one hour. The high-intensity group worked out four days a week for six weeks; each workout lasted four minutes and 20 seconds (with 10 seconds of rest in between each set).

The results; Group 1 had increased their aerobic system (cardiovascular), but showed little or no results for their anaerobic system (muscle). Group 2 showed much more increase in their aerobic system than Group 1, and increased their anaerobic system by 28 percent.In conclusion, high-intensity interval training has more impact on both the aerobic and anaerobic systems.

The Tabata ProgramThe Tabata workout lasts only four minutes, but it's likely to be one of the longest four minutes you've ever endured. The structure of the program is as follows:​

Workout hard for 20 seconds

Rest for 10 seconds

Complete eight rounds

You push yourself as hard as you can for 20 seconds and rest for 10 seconds until you complete eight sets. You can do pretty much any exercise you wish. You can do squats, pushups, rows or any other exercise that works your large muscle groups. Kettlebells work great, too.

An example of a 20-minute Tabata workout looks like this:

Push-ups

Squats

Rows

Sit-ups

Start with push-ups. Perform them for 20 seconds at a high-intensity. Rest for 10 seconds, and then go back to doing push-ups for 20 seconds. Once you complete eight sets of push-ups, rest for one minute.

Next, move on to squats and repeat the sequence of 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off. Once you finish eight sets of squats, rest for one minute, and then do rows. After rows, finish the workout with sit-ups.​Tabata is great to get a quick workout in if you're short on time, you need to switch up your routine, or you want improve endurance and speed. Incorporate this type of workout into your fitness routine and produce results.